It bears repeating that we live in strange times. Take, for instance, duplication technology. Today, no matter who you are, you can draw an image or scribble out some text, and copy it as many times as you’d like. Yet when we consider that copying tech in historical perspective, we discover that this ability is new. For most of the human past, only wealthy elites could clone massive stacks of duplicated materials. Printing has been around for a surprisingly long time, but easy access to portable copying technology is a clear sign of the peculiarity of the present-day.

Join your favorite professional historian on a journey around the globe—to Indonesia, Iraq, China, Germany and Virginia—and find out about how the arts and sciences of duplication have changed over the centuries, and how that journey teaches us about our fundamentally odd world. Along the way, you’ll get to hear a professional historian’s expert audio simulation of a copying technique that dates back nearly 40,000 years. And you’ll hear shocking statements about Thomas Jefferson’s elbows.

Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com !

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Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.